Waste Management

At least 60 people were killed by an avalanche of debris in an Ethiopian landfill on Saturday night. Mountains of trash at Koshee Garbage Landfill near Addis Ababa collapsed in a massive landslide, destroying the makeshift shanties that lined its slopes and killing scavengers who earn a living sorting trash for resale. One resident told […]

Green Prophet recently posted about 2017 being the Chinese year of the monkey, but the Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has instead declared it the ‘Year of Giving’. H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and UAE VP, has launched the non-profit UAE Food Bank, which will distribute unused […]

Want a peek into a dystopian future? This is an update on the garbage crisis in Lebanon, which is largely attributed to a corrupted political system, but it’s also a cautionary tale about uncontrolled consumerism and environmental arrogance that could happen in nearly every free market zip code.

A new video highlighting the importance of recycling is going viral on YouTube, garnering nearly 900,000 views in its first week online. The short clip (under two minutes) features young Israelis combining extreme sport with garbage collection. You’ll be scratching your head trying to figure out how they do it! A pair of gymnasts propels cans into […]

Social media has again proved to be a powerful tool in Tunisia, where a group of people started a Facebook page that turns the ubiquitous ‘selfie’ into an opportunity to express disgust with the country’s stinking trash problem.

The city of Amman in Jordan where I live is experiencing a deteriorating level of municipal services, most notably in garbage collection and public space cleaning. The hills of the city are heaped with trash, and the problem extends to other towns and across the countryside. Even Jordan’s natural jewels are tarnished.

Citizens of the United Arab Emirates receive free healthcare and education, and enjoy subsidized water, electricity and fuel. Men can claim free land and no-interest building loans; couples get cash towards their wedding expenses. And next January, lucky residents in two Abu Dhabi neighborhoods will get high-tech trash bins.

In 2009 during the height of the swine flu epidemic, Egyptian law officials ordered the culling of thousands of pigs belonging to the Coptic Christian community in Cairo. The pigs were used to chomp down the city’s organic waste, which grew to disgusting new heights in garbage city when they were killed. But now they’re […]

My last photo blog on Green Prophet featured one of the many sites in the Hajar Mountains from which construction aggregate is extracted. This time I’m showing a different kind of mountain on the outskirts of Dubai. This is a landfill for building rubble.

Random dumping and burning of plastic garbage, which constitutes a fifth of the Kingdom’s solid waste, are negatively affecting the environment and public health, said a Jordanian official. Good morning, Jordan! Glad to see you waking up to your plastic addiction and outrageously dirty dumping disorder. Plastics, widely introduced to world markets in the 1960’s, have […]

We love the creative eco design coming out of Tel Aviv. Israel faces nationwide challenges of mismanaged waste and insufficient recycling infrastructure, but from the deserts of Morocco to the streets of Tel Aviv, artists like Yotam Shifroni and Gidi Gilam are seeking solutions through creativity. Around four months ago, Shifroni and Gilam opened Studio Sfog in Tel Aviv. Sfog means “sponge” […]

Even though, perversely for a landscape photographer, I tend to seek out uglier-than-average places, this possibly wins the prize for one of the least glamorous locations I’ve photographed. It’s a very sizable field of human excrement on the road from Sharjah to Dhaid in the United Arab Emirates. It’s part of the excellent work being […]

Israeli and Palestinian stage performers are getting together to talk trash. Not nearly as vitriolic on the ground as an outsider might think, the discourse between Arabs and Jews has expanded to include environmental matters that affect both sides such as the cleanliness of shared waterways and skies and the growing problem of trash, among others. […]

Lebanese don’t usually need an excuse to party but they might need an incentive to recycle. Albeit one of the only countries at the COP18 climate change negotiations to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, Lebanon has a shoddy recycling record – mostly because it lacks the necessary infrastructure. Which is why the NGO […]

A new marketplace for Casablanca – complete with rainwater harvesting and a clever trash chute? While the souq or market is integral to Moroccan culture, they are frequently crowded and polluted as population density expands throughout the North African country. TomDavid Architecten from The Netherlands submitted a proposal as part of an international design competition […]

Solar panels at the pyramids. In the past two years since a popular uprising ousted former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the question of sustainability, energy and overall environmental awareness has been as evident as a clean street in Cairo. Basically, it has been nonexistent. Actually, it had been nonexistent until recently. Over the past few months, Egyptians have […]

We speak to waste management expert Salman Zafar about the region’s mounting trash problem and why it’s outpacing all efforts to deal with it A recent report by the World Bank predicts that by 2025, city dwellers could produce as much as 2.2 billion tonnes of solid waste a year – that’s a 70% increase […]

Would innovative waste disposal devices make for tidier Jordanians? Year Two in the Hashemite Kingdom, and my honeymoon with Amman is kaput. It’s impossible to keep the romance alive when your beloved is so totally…trashy. At work, shopping for trash receptacles for a new airport terminal, I stumbled across some wacky waste bins that might’ve saved […]

Movie stars shone on Abu Dhabi red carpets, where the curtain rose on a pair of green films connected to the Middle East. This year’s Abu Dhabi film festival featured two green-themed films aimed at raising awareness of a decidedly un-Hollywood subject: global waste management. Both movies, Trashed and Polluting Paradise, were sponsored by sustainable […]

A novel way to turn cow poop into profits. Would you wear this molded fibre on your wall? The quest for construction materials with low environmental impact is leading product developers to new pastures. Literally, in the case of Noble Environmental Technologies Corporation, whose ECORE line of bio-based panels are made from cow poop. American […]

Stock image of trash dump, Shutterstock. Gaza produces roughly 1,000 pounds of waste every day and until now most of it has gone untreated. But a new recycling plant situated very close to the border with Egypt has recently opened to manage some of this waste, which is otherwise scattered throughout farmlands or in the […]

We probably shouldn’t poke fun at the Dubai Municipality for bribing local residents with cash awards and iPads as part of their recently-launched My City, My Environment recycling program. Because their intentions are essentially good. But it’s so hard to resist when so much that happens in the Vegas of the Middle East (need I […]

In August, Jordan’s Ministry of the Environment started a waste sorting and recycling project at public agencies. According to statements by the ministry, in the first phase of the project, they will implement waste sorting and recycling across a number of ministries, institutions and schools. Environment Minister Yaseen Khayyat said the project is being carried […]

Local press and environmentalists in Egypt claim that the unofficial garbage workers of Cairo – the Zabaleen – are being sidestepped by President Mohamed Morsi’s Clean Homeland campaign, which resolves to solve the country’s overwhelming garbage issue within 100 days. This was a dangerous promise to make given that so many of the systems required […]